So many, many months ago, /u/Kristian1969 asked a question about whether we can corroborate the medieval treatise accounts on silk bow strings with actual finds or non-treatise textual sources and by this point they probably expect that it won’t get an answer.

I still don’t really have an answer, despite spending a lot of time on it, which is why this is here: this is a tale of why we know so little about medieval archery tackle despite there being so much of it around, and how sometimes months of research can get you nowhere until one day you look up something completely different and find the answer you were after (or something very close, but more on that latter) entirely by chance.

So, medieval bowstrings!

I saw this question, and without seeing the non-treatise source requirement figured it would be fairly easy -- literally all of our archery treatises recommend silk strings. L’arte D’archerie, Roi Modus, Toxophilius, Livre de Chasse, all of them think silk is the best material (with Hemp second). Seeing the non-treatise requirement, I still figured it wouldn’t be too bad; after all it was a legal requirement for most men to own a bow, and everyone was recommending silk, surely there had to be some of them around and recorded!

The next thing I did was remember the silk cord found at Waterford, and then immediately discard it as an example. Sure it is officially recorded as a bowstring, but pretty much everybody has misgivings about it: if it is complete as the record says, its too short and shows no abrasions from use, such as where it would be tied to the bow (it doesn’t have loops). So not good enough.

Then, I figured maybe the Guild of Stringers had some documents surviving, indicating material purchase or price fixing or something. Nothing. I found the document forming their guild in 1416, but nothing else.

Moving on, I figured I’d check the wills and debtors-inventories that are often used to source descriptions of arrows. And would you believe it, nothing again! This was where I started to notice a running theme: while great detail would be put into describing the cloth and ornaments owned, very little would be done to describe the archery tackle beyond stating the number of bows and arrows owned except perhaps giving the type of feathers used on the arrows. Generally, there won’t even be a mention of the existence of bowstrings in them at all; bar four, I found no others in the National Archive database and these four weren’t accessible for reading.

At this point I realised how much we actually rely on treatises to know about period archery tackle: we know a fair bit about bow woods from the laws fixing the wood types of practise bows, and the requirements to make non-yew bows when the supply of yew was drying up; and the feather types used for fletching, and their silk bindings are described in fair detail in sources such as the 1422 receipt for John Dyhnam’s arrows and laws requisitioning goose wings; we are otherwise reliant on the treatises for measurements, arrow woods and strings. Okay, maybe that sounds like a lot of stuff we have from out with the treatises but there are still those huge gaps only the treatise fill.

Something like the account of Simon Skeffington’s murder, describing the materials and measurements of each item, is a massive outlier and its why it gets brought up again and again and again. There’s loads on how many bows, how many arrows were bought for military inventories but virtually nothing on their details. I guess I appreciate those early court documents a lot more now.

(This is also probably the time to say a little on what we can provenance for bow strings. It’s mainly flax – cropping up in the Scandinavian skaldic poetry and sagas – and hemp – described in the Skeffington case. Hemp is recommended as a next-best string by Ascham and L’arte D’archerie too. For crossbows, there is the generic ‘packthread’ – as given by the stores in Berwick castle -- and the same stuff as used to make arming points.)

So I’d virtually given up, but last night I was skimming through English Historical Documents to double check some stuff that had been cited from it and my search brought up ‘crossbow string’ and then my eye went down the line a bit and I saw ‘silk’. I had in fact found this snippet from 1472, describing a gift from the King:

“Also, there in the park the king gave him a royal crossbow, the strings of silk, the case covered with velvet of the kings colours and his names and badges thereon. The heads of the three bolts were gilt.”

Or, months of research getting nowhere and I found what I was after when I wasn’t even looking for it…

I still don’t feel its an answer: it is a crossbow string, and it is fairly late. But it is what it is, and at this point unless one of the four accounts I earmarked does end up being digitised I think its as far as I’m going.

And I guess there’s a point somewhere too about whether or not we can trust the treatises when they’re the only sources we have for some of this stuff. Sure, the writers probably made mistakes, and yeah they might be describing an idealised version of things rather what actually went on, but these writers were archers themselves, and they are all united in recommending silk as a stringing material. Can we really disregard them, when they agree and there is little evidence otherwise?

(I had actually found a similar record of a silk crossbow string before, but the source for it was really old and in German so I was lacking too much context to use it. It was a very fancy crossbow though: yew prod, maple stock, silk string, ivory nut and then something made of silver with ‘bauble feathers’ [I’m guessing the arrows]. The translation is… not great…)

How have others approached large volume searches of old scanned newspapers? (e.g. looking at shifts in opinion on an issue over time)

Two main problems seem to make it a timesink.

Older material is more difficult to digitise well. This means searches may lead to the wrong page, or to the wrong place on a page which is densely packed with small articles that require much zooming in and out to check).

Sheer volume of material. There used to be a lot of newspapers, regional and national. Some people may be able to alter a question to creare a narrowed focus. In other cases, maybe if you are doing paid research for someone else, and/or the project simply has large scope, you can't change it, and there must be ways to make it more efficient.

(Rewritten from a post on yesterday's thread after u/sunagainstgold advised posting it here.)

Ive posted about some of his previous expeditions but we have another incredible find from Paul Allen(Microsoft Co-Founder and Seattle Seahawks Owner/Portland Trail Blazers). As a rundown in the past 5 years he has:

1. Recovered the bell from the wreck of HMS Hood.

2. Discovered the wreck of the Musashi

3. Found the IJN battleships Yamashiro and Fuso among other wrecks from Surigao Strait and famed destroyer Shimakaze off Ormoc.

4. And found the USS Indianapolis and USS Ward.

And even helped the USN find the wreckage of a C-2A Greyhound COD aircraft that had crashed in the Philippine Sea on its way to the USS Ronald Reagan in November.

Now he too his research vessel the R/V Petrel is in the Coral Sea and this week announced their new discovery.

That being the wreck of CV-2 the USS Lexington in a remarkably fine condition all told.. And while the multiple torpedoes she ate both from IJN attacks and to finish her off have combined with internal explosions to mangle much of the hull much of the wreck is also still in fine condition. It just goes to show how well cold, deep, and poorly oxygenated waters can help preserve otherwise vulnerable materials.

In particular the aircraft found are almost staggeringly well preserved. Both the 3 TBD Devastators we have photos of and the one F4F-3 Wildcat.

The Wildcat also is an interesting enigma as to its history and who it was being flown by.

It has the Felix the Cat logo meaning that it was flown by Fighting Squadron 3 (VF-3) which had previously been aboard the Saratoga to start the war but had been stranded ashore following her being hit by a torpedo early in the war. VF-3 then split time with VF-2 aboard the Lexington during the early war carrier raids, including an aborted one on Rabaul where the CO Jimmy Thach and his protégé Butch O'Hare first earned their fame and O'Hare the first naval aviator Ace and Medal of Honor of the war. But for Coral Sea they were back in Hawaii, however to fill out numbers VF-3 had loaned VF-2 several pilots and planes for the cruise including this one.

And as we can see it is marked F-5, meaning it is plane number 5 of the fighter squadron. To start the war the number of the squadron would also have been included before the letter but had by then been deleted and most squadrons had complied. Nominally then F-5 was assigned to LT Albert 'Scoop' Vorse who was one of these pilots on loan to VF-2 and commanded the Second Division of the new bolstered VF-2.

Vorse had a busy Coral Sea having been sent out to escort the strike package on May 8th, gotten separated, shot down a Val on the way back, landed on Lex, and then lead 5 F4F's back aloft which were then forced to become refugees aboard Yorktown when their home sank. The Vorse/F-5 assignment is also supported in a chart included in John Lundstrom's typically very reliable 'The First Team'.

However after looking some more and reading around some other sites that focus on this I am going to say I think that is wrong. You can make out a few letters and the kill card suggest it was being flown by, or at least the primary ride for then LT Noel Gayler, another VF-3 pilot on loan and then serving at least for now as VF-2's XO. He had gotten several kills during the aborted 20FEB raid on Rabaul and also participated in bombing of IJN surface ships during the Lae-Salamaua Raid in March.

And while pilots routinely flew aircraft that they weren't nominally assigned to it also would make sense too if Gayler was flying the aircraft all day instead of Vorse as this one obviously ended up on the bottom and not Yorktown. Both men survived the war while rising to command squadrons and eventually even higher with both going to put on Admiral's stars with Vorse retiring as a Rear Admiral and Gayler eventually becoming a 4-star and becoming Commander of the Pacific Fleet in the mid 70's.